Self Examination

Am I a ‘breast man’? I’m reminded of the old Woody Allen gag about Picasso: ‘He began breaking her body down into its basic geometrical shapes, until the police arrived’

But no, Ella remained emphatic: her view had been unobstructed, the visibility was excellent, while moreover, the woman had pirouetted in a beam of light which fell from a lunette window overhead, turning this way and that, so that her breasts swung free: “They were quite smooth, all over, with no sign of anything remotely resembling an aureole — let alone a teat,” said Ella.

The thing was, I may’ve bridled — and be bridling still — but that was only because knowing Ella as I did, I couldn’t for a second doubt her testimony. The first time I met her, I’d just been handed a bowl of trifle, and peering speculatively at the yellow morass, she’d said: “That’ll be easy to throw up later.” And so it proved. Anyway, I’ve never for a nanosecond worried that a woman’s vagina might contain a full set of molars, incisors and a quartet of canines, while remaining everhaunted by the possibility that I, too, may one day meet my unmaker — the woman-with-no-nips.

I’m pretty sure a psychoanalyst would have plenty to say about this; while I also can acknowledge the Gordian knotting of the erotic and the maternal that subsists — like a currant buried in blancmange — in my tortured unconscious. I was born — see Esquire passim — with a congenital hernia, and spent the first six weeks of my life in a cage-like cot in Charing Cross Hospital, with a sign hung from its bars (or so my mother assured me later) that read, “Nil by mouth”. Go figure. Am I a “breast man”? I’m reminded of the old Woody Allen gag about Picasso: “He began breaking her body down into its basic geometrical shapes, until the police arrived.” The very idea smacks of a fetishism we’d all, surely, like to be absolved of, or otherwise delivered?

And yet… and yet… what is a breast without a nipple? Note the almost obsessive concentration, in pornography, on the nipple of the female breast. Heterosexual men invest the nipple with all the eroticism that might more properly belong, not only to the breast, but to the entire, glorious woman, her body, mind and soul. Such is the grotesque and deathly cluster-fuck of modern mediatisation: “Beyoncé’s Bra Boob!” swelling from the screen, her exposed nipple a black hole into which all love disappears. Forever. Yes, yes, I understand the biology, the ingathering of nerve endings to the D-cup data centre, but neither man or woman is reducible to this.

We are more than what we slobber over, lick, then nip between our pursed lips while flicking with our tongues, and otherwise… eat. No! Let me state my case here: down with such tawdry parcelling-off of the female form! Down with the fetishisation and commoditisation of the female body! Let the polymorphously perverse replace the pornographically standardised, and let the nipple-less woman dance forever in the beam of light that falls from a lunette window overhead; let her dance, most of all, dear reader, because that nipple-less woman… c’est moi.

And you as well — if you’re a heterosexual man. It’s a worse than zero-sum game, this objectifying gaze of ours; and even as it endows the female nipple with the sinister power to drive us mad, so it deprives our own of any sensation they might possess. Yes, it’s us who’re humiliated possessors of the proverbial two gnats on an ironing board, us who feel compelled — even unto late middle age, nowadays — to strut about the place with our chests bared, and our top bollocks jiggling. Things could be so much better if our lives weren’t punctuated by these excruciatingly prolonged moob-boobs; if instead, we covered them up in satin, lace and silk (or leather and steel, if that’s the way you roll).

Our lives would be that much fuller, too, if we invested our nipples with just a fraction of their sisters’ erogeneity. “Why oh, why,” I moan plaintively, as I stare down at my neglected nips, “hast I abandoned thee?” The biblically orotund being the way I habitually address my own body parts. Or at least, I used to so moan. I don’t want to gross you out, but in recent times I’ve been, um… examining my breasts, with the assistance of a friend, and while they take considerable coaxing — and will certainly never achieve much salience — I’d like to inform you, dear readers, that my nipples are fully capable of becoming erect. And I’d like you to hold that image — not the one of the nipple-less woman — in your minds until next month.